The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.

De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance to Mussolini's puppet republic in the north. He was imprisoned by the Germans in Austria and only after the liberation by the Russians was he able to return to Rome to continue his studies as an architect, which he finished even though he had already developed a passion for photography and cinema.

His first professional experience was as an assistant to the director Jean-Paul Le Chanois on Le Village Magique (1955), filmed at Cefalù near Palermo. He soon found a way to produce, direct and usually photograph himself short films which were mostly 10 minutes long.

A law of the time obliged cinemas to include shorts in their programmes, though this was not always well received by the audience. However, they could sometimes capture your attention – especially when the imagery, music and natural sounds were as stunning as those in De Seta's little masterpieces, dedicated to antique working-class traditions, with Sicilian fishermen rowing out to catch swordfish or tuna, miners in grim underground sulphur mines and the rituals of harvesters and Easter parades in Sardinia.

Isole di Fuoco (Island of Fire, 1954), which was filmed during a volcano eruption on one of the Aeolian Islands off the north Sicilian coast, won him the award for best short documentary at Cannes in 1955. In 1959, De Seta directed a short about Sardinian shepherds. He then sold two of his family properties in order to make a feature film, Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo, 1961), about an honest Sardinian shepherd and his brother who, wrongly accused of a theft, flee with their flock to the barren mountains where the sheep can't survive, so the pair become "bandits" themselves, stealing a flock from a neighbour's farm. Like Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), it was acted by non-professionals who spoke in dialect.

Though we all admired De Seta's film at the 1961 Venice festival, where it won best first work, I remember that it seemed a pity that it had to be dubbed into regular Italian. This had been a condition for finding finance from a distribution company to finish postproduction, after Federico Fellini's short-lived distribution outfit had declined to give support to De Seta. It was De Seta who introduced Fellini to the Jungian psychiatrist Ernst Bernhard, whom De Seta visited for analysis, and who had a significant influence on Fellini's life and work.

De Seta's rare subsequent features were not always successful, especially when he had to work with professional actors, as was the case of two films co-produced with the French: Un Uomo a Metà (Shadow of a Man, 1966), with Jacques Perrin, and L'Invitata (The Invited Lady, 1969) with Michel Piccoli.

Much more convincing was the mini-series Diario di un Maestro (A Teacher's Diary, 1973), based on the autobiography of a schoolteacher who used revolutionary teaching methods at a school in a Roman slum area. The children were played by real boys from a Pasolini-style world, but the teacher was portrayed by an intelligent young Neapolitan stage actor, Bruno Cirino, who had worked with Eduardo De Filippo and was able to adapt, with reciprocal understanding, to De Seta's style. This series went down well with Italian TV audiences and was shown at various international festivals.

De Seta retired to Sellia Marina, southern Italy, and devoted most of his time to farming, which, in a recent renewal of his identity card, he described as his profession. He continued to accept film work that interested him, and was delighted when the Cineteca of Bologna invited him to supervise the restoration of his early shorts, now available in a DVD set. In Calabria in 1959 he had made a short entitled I Dimenticati about the forgotten people of a forlorn mountain village; in 1993 he made a longer documentary there, entitled In Calabria. One of his last films was Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara, 2006), about an immigrant from Senegal who lands on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa.

After the death of his wife, Vera Gherarducci, who had collaborated with him on his early documentaries, De Seta was looked after by his granddaughter, also named Vera, who is among his surviving family.

• Vittorio De Seta, film director, born 15 October 1923; died 28 November 2011